Debra Pickett

"I consider myself lucky," Stephen says, as he settles in to a booth at the elegantly appointed Custom House restaurant in Printers Row, "because I have a lot of friends whose relationships [with their fathers] are more challenging."

John Baird, wearing his signature bow tie, nods sagely at this. He says the secret to their relationship, working and otherwise, is that he just stays out of the way.

But, a few minutes into our lunch of salads and iced teas, it's clear that this is not quite true.

Stephen Baird clearly enjoys his father's company and relishes John's ability to charmingly hold forth on Chicago history, politics and business. If he is the one running the business these days, it is also true that his father is still running the show.

Being chairman of the board is "just a nominal thing," says John Baird. Then he proceeds to completely dominate the next hour's conversation, telling stories, gently needling his son and making clear in a hundred other small ways that he is still the company's heart and soul.

'Probably have disinherited me'

The Baird family (Warner was an in-law) has held to a firm commitment to keep their business in one piece, with the heirs in each generation selling their ownership shares to a single sibling or cousin who will take over.

For Stephen, that meant negotiating with his brothers, sisters and cousins before he could assume full control. "One brother also had some interest," he says tactfully. "He really wanted to go into real estate development."

That brother now has his own business in another state.

"I'm sure there were issues with you and your brother," Stephen says to his father.

"Never with my brother," John replies, "but one of my first jobs was to negotiate with my father's sister to buy out her piece -- because he couldn't do it."

Stephen just nods. Since taking over the family business 15 years ago, he has transformed the company from a many-armed real estate conglomerate, with development projects and a full-service property management division, into a purely residential brokerage.

I ask John how he feels about the reshaping of the company he helped build.

"It's very simple," he says, "the real estate industry really changed fundamentally at the time he took over."

"I know that my grandfather would not recognize the company," Stephen says. "He didn't think much of residential realty. ... He'd probably have disinherited me when I sold that property management company."

"No --" John replies, but doesn't go on. His expression seems to say that, yes, Warner Baird would have been a little upset about that one.

Spearheaded downtown boom

There's a brief lull in conversation, as both men, who frequently eat lunch at their desks, quickly consume their salads. As he eats, John Baird looks out the window at the busy street scene that surrounds this corner building. He doesn't really need to see what's there. He can name, from memory, the buildings that surround us: the Pontiac Building, the Morton Building, a half dozen others.

He sees them, he says, not only as they are now and how they once were, but also how they once might have been, when plans were made to make them into apartments rather than offices.

Under his direction, Baird & Warner spearheaded much of the early '80s redevelopment of this neighborhood. It's a point of pride with him, this great gamble that he took.

"I don't mean to be egotistical," he says, "but our building at 200 N. Dearborn, which was an urban renewal site ... that [building] and Printers Row really demonstrated to the real estate community that people would live close to the Loop."

Before that, he tells me, "I remember someone in your capacity asking me why we were doing this rather than some nice subdivision out in the suburbs."

Stephen laughs -- it is awfully funny now -- but he also reminds his father of just how dicey things were back then. One of his first assignments when he joined the firm was to recruit a grocery chain to build a store in the retail space in the Transportation Building. It couldn't be done.

He says, as his father nods in agreement, "I remember talking to people, people saying it's just not safe there."

"At one time," John says, "we actually pulled the police reports for Dearborn, south of Congress, and compared them to North Michigan Avenue. There was a lot more crime up there. But no one paid a lot of attention to that."

John Baird has always had something of the crusader in him. An early advocate of open-housing laws and integration, he took on development projects in blighted neighborhoods at a time when gentrification was not yet such a sure thing.

"If he was solely interested in making money," Stephen, a Harvard MBA, says of his father, "he wouldn't have gotten into some of that."

"Well," John says, "I guess that's true." And he smiles a little, like it might or might not be.